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Seems like Spock was right and Kirk was wrong. Letting Khan loose culminated with the huge spaceship crash at the end, probably killed a lot more people than there are Enterprise crew. (I'm guessing RLM or someone noticed this, but haven't checked yet.) Thematically this can work with the "saving your family" theme, but the film should have acknowledged that was a consequence instead of just celebrating Kirk's newfound greatness at the end. Also if they're going to go with ridged Klingons they should all be chunky TNG hairshirt cosplay dudes.
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May 28, 2013 17:13
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sean10mm posted:In your rush to be smartasses you've overlooked the fact that the admiral was also trying to start a galactic war that would have casualties way beyond a ship crashing. It wasn't just about saving the Enterprise, bigger issues were at stake. The bigger issues are swept aside in this narrative. Kirk, who already commits plenty of acts of war against the Klingons, was willing to surrender to said admiral and give him everything he wanted, "just spare my crew." And it's not like he's learned Khan is any less dangerous than when he invades Klingon territory in the first place. yronic heroism fucked around with this message at 17:47 on May 28, 2013 |
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May 28, 2013 17:40
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computer parts posted:A war with the Soviet Union. That they had already gone to great lengths to invite. See above edit to my post. The problem is the whole plot machine runs itself in circles and breaks down in the course of one-upping the last threat. This is not a minor plot hole. Like say, the dumbness of Marcus's war strategy. If he sees conflict with the Klingons as inevitable, stalling for time is a no-brainer move since he can keep building more gently caress-off warships.
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May 28, 2013 17:56
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api call girl posted:And as the movie painstakingly establishes, going to the Klingon homeworld to then kill a bunch of klingons in "self-defense" was a horrendously bad idea that runs counter to every one of humanity's then ideals. Not to mention good sense. No, it's painted as the right thing to do in order to capture Khan and put him on trial*, as opposed to using torpedo drones or whatever. *Or just freeze him again at the end, whatever.
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May 28, 2013 17:59
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computer parts posted:Have you seen Doctor Strangelove? Some people want a war to come. Hell, you can even argue it was part of his plan all along to "redeem" the Enterprise with a strike on the Klingon homeworld which is part of why he showed up so fast. Dr. Strangelove is a good movie. Also a satire. I'm saying I didn't find the strategy that realistic combined with the other stuff the character says (if war is inevitable you don't need to do some "inside job" thing), but I'm just pointing to it as a minor plot hole, so okay. The major thing is just what every other critic's been saying, good pacing but less holding the plot and theme together than your average Star Wars prequel.
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May 28, 2013 18:06
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sean10mm posted:This is a really bizarre stance since the whole movie is about how Kirk isn't actually a good captain yet and develops over the course of the movie. Violating Klingon territory and getting into a gunfight instead of bombing it blindly was "better," but not actually "good," as the movie makes really obvious. Even Spock says it's the right thing to do. And Marcus hates that he does it. You say "really obvious" based on your takeaway, whereas I don't really think the movie (with its end crash) is subtle enough to even make that obvious.
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May 28, 2013 18:12
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computer parts posted:Kirk learns to not make terrible decisions as a commander. Much like the reasoning behind the plot points, we're going in circles, because I think the most terrible decision was letting Khan free on a dreadnought orbiting the planet he already bombed twice.
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May 28, 2013 18:16
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sean10mm posted:If they keep Khan prisoner, they can't take over the Vengeance because only he has the insider knowledge necessary to do so. So the Vengeance reboots its systems and disintegrates them all, then the evil maniac admiral with all of Starfleet at his disposal starts a galactic war. In that case the film needs to poo poo or get off the pot about whether such a war is even that risky (since it's apparently a backburner concern when the plot needs it to be), or avoidable in the long run. quote:If they let Khan loose, the worst case scenario is one evil maniac with one Starship who goes on to do...something...against all the rest of Starfleet. Well they made sure to build him up as the evilest fucker ever with Nimoy's cameo. Also, earth was apparently undefended thanks to another plot hole you want us not to nitpick, so I don't know where you're getting the rest of Starfleet. computer parts posted:Which if you noticed was foreshadowed by Spock's reaction to "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". The film tries to sell this as a "Kirk is right and we need his bravado and Spock doesn't understand because  " moment.
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May 28, 2013 18:43
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Astroman posted:Yeah, but imagine if 8000 people were killed and the government told them: "It's OK. It was all to prevent a possible war. Nobody would say that was justified (except maybe hardcore needs of the many Vulcans). Basically, there are too many variables and no way to definitely say Marcus' plan would have worked, it would have started a war with the Klingons, and hundreds of thousands would have died. A lot could happen in between "A" and "B" which makes giving Khan the keys to a giant fuckoff warship which he uses to wreck a city a pretty horrible move, in retrospect. It also seems incredibly predictable that Khan will get those keys hands-down. And I mean predictable in the narrative. Since both Kirk and Spock see it coming, and really only Simon Pegg and Kirk stand in the way of Superkillguy. (But I guess if we are second-guessing Kirk deciding to launch a raid to catch the guy in Act I, we can now second guess him not telling Scotty "set to kill, seriously, bro.") I do think they could have explored a lot of the same territory a lot less clumsily, but it felt like they wanted to make an action movie that also makes a statement, but they didn't think out the statement much. Just slap it on at the end, have some pew-pew scenes, have a bunch of actors try way too hard to impersonate some other actors.
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May 28, 2013 19:00
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computer parts posted:Yes and the outcome is upended. This is known as "irony". Apparently other fans of the film disagree and think it's hands down the right call. See below. sean10mm posted:Again, what was the alternative to Kirk's decision in the situation he was presented with? If he didn't have a better alternative it wasn't "the most terrible decision" was it? You really want to go into the realm of alternate movie plot history? Okay. Bum rush the enemy ship with most of his crew, since the Vengeance apparently only has twelve guys on it. Or since they're at earth already, call Starfleet and let them know the admiral's dastardly plan. Even ram the other ship though I guess they already did that in Nemesis. I think this is a pointless exercise that distracts from dumb plotting, but there you go. quote:Plus this is the same Kirk who admits to Spock he doesn't know what he's doing. The whole film is tearing down his excessive cockiness. He doesn't know what he's doing at the end either. He just sacrifices himself because there's no other choice and he's an action hero. But the courage of the dude was never in doubt... it's about judgment. So there's no learning or growth. Just following the same hot-shot instincts as always. This is what I am talking about when I say the whole thing is clumsy and muddled. It aspires to certain themes and character arcs without actually delivering. quote:You're just engaging in a huge dodge and arguing in bad faith here I apologize for being wrong on the internet, I guess. I don't really want to argue though. Just set out my reasons for not liking the film. If you don't find them compelling, fine.
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May 28, 2013 19:22
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Cyra posted:JJ Abrams is gonna rock Star Wars so hard. Go see this movie. Possibly. But if I have to sit through a bunch of emoting about what it means to be Han and Luke or they reimagined Wookiees as anything, gonna nerdrage so hard.
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May 28, 2013 19:31
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sean10mm posted:No, I'm telling you the movie presents a situation, and Kirk makes a decision that's logical based on the information the character has available to him, so calling it "terrible" doesn't make very much sense. He's not operating in a vacuum and giving Khan the keys to a ship "just because." As far as his character is able to reasonably discern the only alternative to that is everyone dying and the evil plot going on unhindered. First, the plotting doesn't present the situation as clearly as you'd like. Second, my argument isn't about what Kirk discerns so much as it turns out to be a cluster and that goes unaddressed by a film that wants to tie everything up by telling us the (generic) moral at the end. e: And, to take the cake, the moral is basically about unintended consequences. quote:They couldn't bum rush the ship because Khan was the only one who knew how to get into the ship. They couldn't ram it because they were dead in space. And if Kirk can call Starfleet, so can the guy who outranks him by miles, making that avenue pointless. They weren't dead in space because they had engines that were keeping them from falling to earth. Scotty was the key to getting in, not Khan. And the point of calling Starfleet would be to expose the plot, not to immediately win a pissing match. I don't want to hash this stuff out forever. The point is STID doesn't do a good job dismissing these possibilities to make me buy "free Khan and have only two mere mortals keeping an eye on him" as the only choice. The narrative counts on the audience being on the edge of their seats and not thinking it all out. It's action movie logic for sure, which is where a lot of the "Not Star Trek" feeling comes from, though the problem for me is more it's disjointed action movie logic. yronic heroism fucked around with this message at 19:51 on May 28, 2013 |
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May 28, 2013 19:42
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sean10mm posted:Except that nobody had any idea how to get into the ship without Khan telling them every step of the way. How did you miss that? So, get him to walk them through it, or take him along with fifty Enterprise crew.
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May 28, 2013 19:53
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api call girl posted:You're saying that people with the complete inability to engage with even the text of the film frequently may fail every level of critical analysis of it? The text of the film, good goons. (With insightful writer commentary on "misogeny".) yronic heroism fucked around with this message at 19:59 on May 28, 2013 |
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May 28, 2013 19:57
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api call girl posted:Please explain how a gratuitous lingerie shot has any bearing on your inability to comprehend the parameters of the endgame setup of the movie. Not enough blood going to the brain? Well, as RLM would say, it shows prioritization of lowest common denominator pablum. Also the screenwriter sounds like a moron or a fidgety child. As for the "parameters of the endgame setup," it's not my fault they did a poor job establishing them. Or is it? Maybe this movie is just too smart for me, unlike the 13 year olds in the front row who loved it.
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May 28, 2013 20:08
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quote:A distinction without a difference. If the admiral can just tell everyone to ignore the captain (pro tip, they can, that's what being an admiral means) it's a waste of time. I'm pretty sure if the captain of an aircraft carrier called the joint chiefs (or the White House, or the media) and said hey, my superior is legit corrupt and ordered me to take illegal actions and start a war with China, there would definitely be an investigation. And sinking the captain's ship after that would be a big loving admission of guilt. quote:Oh, that's right, you're not arguing in good faith, you're engaging in a series of dodges and changes of subject whenever you get cornered on something. Tell me more about arguing in good faith about the relative ramming impulse speeds of imaginary spaceships. quote:And aren't the crew busy dealing with all the huge holes blasted in the ship's critical systems 5 minutes earlier? The beauty of my made up fictional counter-historical plan is they can abandon ship, board the other one, and not worry about that. Do you really find these points so interesting that dropping them is bad faith? I think the "text" didn't do a good job conveying the ending action movie logic in terms of possible Star Trek tactics. You disagree. I don't want a fanfic contest over it. yronic heroism fucked around with this message at 20:25 on May 28, 2013 |
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May 28, 2013 20:19
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The lingerie scene shows Kirk being chastised by a woman he cannot seduce. Carol is not embarrassed and trying to cover herself, but blithely indifferent, if slightly annoyed. She thinks Kirk is pathetic, and Kirk both looks pathetic and feels pathetic. I thought it was modeled on GURM since there's a fixation on twincest.
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May 28, 2013 20:21
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sean10mm posted:It's just another example how a certain kind of fan ruins everything. Funny, they said the same thing about certain kinds of Star Trek fans. But I guess the fact that they pointed it out means the observation is poo poo.
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May 28, 2013 20:28
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The STID review isn't Plinkett, it looks like it's basically the actual guys sitting around a table saying what they thought did and didn't work. Minimal artifice with an opening sketch. Better than most youtube reviewers, at least.
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May 28, 2013 20:33
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1st AD posted:Their other Star Trek movie reviews are loving awful, just full of pedantic nitpicking. At one point Plinkett literally says "I don't like this because it's different from the Star Trek I'm used to" and I don't think that statement is intended to be read as anything but straight. I mean those movies did stink so it's a wash, but it's not like RLM has any special insight on filmmaking or anything. I actually went to the theater inclined to enjoy Into Darkness becuse a lot of really obsessive Star Trek fans seemed to hate it. My problem was it wasn't a good movie on its own and the weight of the franchise just dragged it down. Which is a common enough problem these days. yronic heroism fucked around with this message at 20:46 on May 28, 2013 |
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May 28, 2013 20:44
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api call girl posted:When the characters on screen tell you "hey we can't maneuver" you should probably start from that rather than going into left field with 'they can maneuver they're just lying to each other/the viewers'. The fictional set-up is what it is. The problem is a real person wrote the script and half-assed it. So they do maneuver to get their airlock aligned and something is keeping them in orbit until the plot dictates they need to almost crash. Did you watch the Room and conclude Tommy Wiseau's character was a really smart guy because some other character said he was? Because I concluded Tommy Wiseau couldn't write a convincing smart character.
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May 28, 2013 20:55
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quote:The difference would be if the guy who is literally in charge of telling if guys are smart or not tells you Tommy Wiseau is smart. I mean, granted, that last assertion could still be true. But that has nothing to do with whether or not the condition itself was true in the movie itself. Which is what you're disputing. The big issue is poor plotting and lazy writing, hence the The Room comparison. Now let me tell you about how Captain Kirk is Raskolnikov because. quote:Do you get that this is, like, fiction, and these rules are arbitrary? Yes, they're so specifically arbitrary that every work of fiction must turn out exactly the way it does. That is why we cannot question how the story was presented for we live in the best of possible worlds. Now sit down and enjoy your Jar Jar because that's the only way they're getting through the planet core!
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May 28, 2013 21:19
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Alchenar posted:If their communicators were out then how did Spock have a chat with himself on New Vulcan? That's enough of your filthy verisimilitude, sir. Let your imagination free. Now enjoy all the obsessive attention to CG rendering and detailed green boobs.
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May 29, 2013 10:45
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Lord Krangdar posted:Yeah, wouldn't the fleet be positioned for war to break out with the Klingons? Don't have anything guarding your capital that's just been attacked? Twice?
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May 30, 2013 16:10
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Cingulate posted:"A ship under my direct command was destroyed on a secret mission in Klingon space under unclear circumstances. Clearly, an act of unilateral, unprovoked aggression! Conveniently, we already had the fleet parked in a perfect position for retaliation." I assume to avoid that the actual plan would have to involve the Klingons either formally declaring war or just launching a massive offensive. Or so my limited movie-text-ignoring, fun-hater brain speculates, but then why leave Earth of all places undefended? Klingons can just warp in, pound it to rubble, and win straight up. api call girl posted:Strategic tactical realism strikes again. You've been reminding me of a favorite quote: Wag the Movie posted:If we believe (incorrectly) that our tastes in entertainment define us as people, then a negative review of a movie becomes more than just an opinion of a film. It becomes a personal attack. That’s what these people are going through. They have put so much of themselves into their media that critiquing a work in their brain is the equivalent of deliberately accosting them and all they hold dear. As someone who writes about film all the time, I can easily see where this can occur. This is, after all, the internet, which is a place where thoughtful discussion can happen, but seldom does. Instead, we’re hesitant to listen to others’ points, and happier with a never-ending backlog of “NO YOU’RE WRONG.”
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May 30, 2013 17:01
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quote:I'm sure both of you have valuable things to say about for or against movie. No need to make it personal, and no enjoyment to read it, either. e: sounds about right Going off that, I thought it would have been cooler if an angry Spock starts out losing the fight to Khan and then regains his composure to unleash really logical Vulcan fight moves. Instead they went with the reverse. The "get a lot tougher when you're angry" bit is more of a Star Wars motif. I freely admit this is nitpicking. yronic heroism fucked around with this message at 17:31 on May 30, 2013 |
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May 30, 2013 17:23
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Lord Krangdar posted:Where we really disagree is that I don't see an unanswered question, like why weren't ships visibly defending Earth at the end of the film, as an automatic flaw. If I wasn't happy to ignore some of those things or make up a satisfactory answer myself I could never enjoy any Star Trek media ever. Honestly I wouldn't care if it were any old Federation Planet, but Earth was stretching it for me.
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May 30, 2013 17:36
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I thought the uniforms looked like crap. Like they wanted them to kind of look like OS uniforms only worse and weirdly baggy. The should have either redesigned 'em or kept the old ones. I agree the lighting was good.DeimosRising posted:There's hardly anything defending Washington D.C. and the Pentagon was attacked just over a decade ago. This just isn't how societies that aren't at war function (or most societies that are) and Starfleet isn't even a military organization in the film. That's like, a big part of the plot. They made a big deal of defending DC, including AA batteries and jet patrols, after 9/11. And remember Khan has already had his "Pentagon attack" moment by this part of the film. yronic heroism fucked around with this message at 21:08 on May 30, 2013 |
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May 30, 2013 21:06
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Plus, this is an action movie and the cast is all devoted to action-y military things. Science and exploration have been the main hook of maybe one of the last four trek movies.HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:This is a little bit of a stretch, given what came of that. Operative word "after." As in after 9/11 and after Khan's first two attacks on Earth.
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May 30, 2013 23:56
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Cingulate posted:What has he learned? I don't really know. I'm not sure he has learned anything. But, must he? Must our movies feature a protagonist who learns something?
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May 31, 2013 15:42
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Basically what Alchenar said.
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May 31, 2013 15:46
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Great_Gerbil posted:Unless you're at war, it's a tremendous waste of resources to have anything more than a few ships at a time just hanging around space dock. The Starfleet guy is literally trying to incite an immediate war with the most warrior-focused guys in the universe.
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Jun 1, 2013 14:26
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qntm posted:To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no one has gone before! Technically this movie had a new civilization (that we learned almost nothing about). Other than that the last three movies had none of these things. On the one hand I generally believe in judging a story for what it is, but I do think it's fair to expect a film to include certain elements when it's trying to cash in on the Star Trek brand.
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Jun 3, 2013 11:18
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api call girl posted:I feel like the Nibiru segment manages to tell us more about the Nibiruans by showing, in those few minutes, than pretty much any of the TOS movies with any associated "new civilizations" in whatever their entire runtimes. That's why TNG is the best trek.  Cingulate posted:But the only ST movies where new, alien civilizations are important are I and Insurrection. The Nexus in Generations should probably qualify, and First Contact had, well, the first contact.
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Jun 3, 2013 14:46
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In the 60s Roddenberry imagined some post racial utopia where of course people of the late 20th century wouldn't care about race for their genetically modified superman. With the benefit of hindsight of course Khan's genes would be tweaked to make him a white guy, regardless of the race of his birth parents. This assumes white political elites are the ones who control the technology behind Khan and his compatriots, not a stretch given the wealth such a project would require. Wouldn't Mitt Romney want to fund a perfect being that looked like him? Imagine the freak-outs on Fox News if our new genetic overlords did not resemble "traditional America." Which is a lot of words to explain away a casting decision that had nothing to do with the above To me, the more interesting question is this: if Khan doesn't have to be a person of color, do Kirk and McCoy need to be white? Does Spock?
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Jun 5, 2013 14:03
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Danger posted:Of course not, why would they need to be. It's important to further distinguish Roddenberry's 'post-racial utopia' as a decidedly acultural and assimilated one. It's "progress" lies not in an authentic acceptance of the other, but a purge of otherness from the Federation's liberal democracy. Actually did anyone notice in TNG and DS9 that while there were interracial couples, they still seemed to be the exception? I wondered if they were trying to say something there or it was just casting choices as a sign of the times that we lived in (and still do).
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Jun 7, 2013 12:35
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Space Hamlet posted:(Though Avery Brooks was a real force for good on his show.) I like the episode where Sisko said "Actually black people weren't really welcome in the setting of this hologram program" and boycotted it. yronic heroism fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Jun 8, 2013 |
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Jun 8, 2013 03:42
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The Warszawa posted:(hell, or even nonwhite Bones, for whom being black makes so much goddamn sense) I'm curious about this.
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Jun 9, 2013 15:50
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